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Why Would a .NET Programmer Learn Ruby on Rails?

I’d recommend reading this to any .NET programmers, a good article on how learning Ruby (or any ‘other’ language) helps to make you a better programmer. A couple of his points mentioned, do not compile and dynamically enhance the behavior of a class – without a Decorator, highlight the benefits I have experienced with Ruby.

I am currently employed working on an ASP.NET 2 web project and coding a Ruby on Rails project (www.trawlr.com) in my spare time. I quite often find myself in the .NET world thinking “this would be so much easier, quicker and fewer lines of code with Ruby”. In fact the Ruby on Rails knowledge has helped to make me realise just how important it is to choose the right tool for a given job. I’ve also dabbled with PHP in the past (before discovering the joy of Ruby on Rails) and have always enjoyed the very quick code / run cycle. It makes changing and testing code much less tiresome than with .NET where you have to recompile after each change (and it always seems to takes an age).